The Last Taxi Ride

by A. X. Ahmad

  The doomed courtesan had been changed to an aging bar girl, drunken and desperate, taking on young lovers to stave off her mortality. The setting had been changed, too—Bombay had now been officially renamed Mumbai, and the film was set in this new globalized city of call centers and high-tech billionaires, its twelve million inhabitants marching to the beat of cell phone ringtones.

  Ruksana had been dead against Shabana acting in the Pakeezah remake. Even Don Hajji Mustafa—under investigation for tax evasion, he had fled the country and found a safe haven in Dubai—called Shabana and cautioned her against taking on the role. But Sanjeev was certain she could pull it off, and Shabana gathered up her courage and defied them both.

  When Ruksana screamed and yelled and threatened to quit, Shabana quietly accepted her resignation, leaving her sister stunned. Sanjeev helped Shabana to hire a professional manager, and an international bank, flush with money, had willingly stepped in to finance the film, replacing the Don.

  Shabana missed her sister, not all the time, but when she was alone. It was strange to have control over her own time, and not entirely pleasant; she had grown used to Ruksana making decisions for her. She tried to telephone Ruki, to check in with her, see what she was doing, but her sister wouldn’t take her calls. Shabana had heard that Ruki was devastated and deeply depressed, and didn’t leave her new flat, though there were other rumors that she had taken up painting.

  Well, Ruki was an adult—that was what Sanjeev said—and would have to find her own way. Anyway, Shabana had to concentrate on her own career, and the remake of Pakeezah would take up every bit of her creative energy.

  No other actress had ever dared to reinterpret the role defined by the iconic Meena Kumari, and Shabana felt tremendous pressure. As it is, she was being excoriated in the film press as a “loose” woman, because she and Sanjeev were openly living together. He had moved into her flat after Ruksana moved out, and they had fallen into a domestic routine: he made her chai in the morning, and they ate dinner together every night.

  As Shabana walked to her car, sipping chai from her travel mug, she reminded herself that the days of living under Ruksana’s—and the Don’s—rule were over. She was her own woman now, and to hell with what people thought. As long as she had Sanjeev’s company at the end of each day, she would be fine.

  When a white-bearded man appeared out of nowhere and held out his hand, Shabana was puzzled. He was too clean to be a beggar—though his white kurta was old, it was washed and ironed.

  Just then a black Maruti van zoomed in, cutting Shabana off from her car, and four men emerged, their faces masked by checked handkerchiefs. She stood, stunned, and the old man gently took the mug of chai from her hands before the men grabbed her and pushed her into the black van.

  It all happened so fast that Shabana only felt afraid when the van accelerated away and she smelled the brownish odor of the men pressed up against her: they smelled of poverty and slums and bathing outside under a tap.

  Rough hands tied a blindfold around her eyes, and a voice said, “Keep still. The Boss wants to see you.”

  “Why are you doing this? Who is your boss.”

  “Shut up. You’ll find out soon enough.”

  The men said no more. Plunged into darkness, Shabana felt the pressure of their bodies against hers as the car sped up and stopped, making its way through morning rush-hour traffic.

  Fighting down her panic, Shabana tried to remember what she had heard about the Mumbai mob. With Don Hajji Mustafa in exile in Dubai, his lieutenants had started their own gangs in Mumbai, and were battling for control over the city. To finance their operations they were extorting money from film directors, industrialists, and the new-tech millionaires: those who wouldn’t pay up died in their cars, shot at close range. One gang left a hammer behind as a trademark; others threw laddoos, orange sweets, onto the bodies of their victims. Shabana had heard all this, and, secure in her new love, never even thought it applied to her.

  Which gang was kidnapping her? The constant jolting of the car caused the blindfold around Shabana’s head to droop for an instant, and she caught a glimpse of a giant billboard outside, with her own smiling face on it advertising Sunsilk shampoo. The men quickly tightened the blindfold, but that glimpse told her that they were in Andheri, heading north.

  She began to count the number of times that the car stopped at traffic lights. After fifteen lights, they screeched to a stop, and the men hustled her outside. They warned her that there was a wide, open drain right ahead of her, and she walked, still blindfolded, across a wooden plank. Then there were sixteen wooden stairs, old and creaky, and she climbed them slowly, one man on either side of her. As she ascended, she heard the thwop-thwop of clothes being beaten against stones, and knew that there was a dhobi-ghaat, a washerman’s colony, close by. At the top of the stairs, they walked through a short corridor and entered a room where her blindfold was taken off.

  She thought that the small, dark room was empty, but as her eyes adjusted, she saw a man sitting on a bed, so dark-skinned that she could see only the flash of white teeth.

  When he flicked on a bare bulb, she gasped. It was Veenu Gopal, the Don’s muscleman, nicknamed “the Hammer.” He was bare-chested, his muscle turning to flab, his eyes bloodshot.

  “What is this? You know me. What are you doing?”

  “What am I doing? Ask yourself, what are you doing, hanh? Hanh? You have broken with the Don, you have no protection, and you have shacked up with some man. You have become a shameless whore.”

  “How dare you. I’ll tell the Don.”

  The Hammer laughed. “The Don? He’s just an old man in an air-conditioned villa, far away in Dubai. I rule the streets here. And you will do as I say.” He slammed a huge fist into the palm of his other hand, and Shabana saw that his knuckles had been broken and reset so many times that they were hard knobs of bone.

  The Hammer picked up a cell phone and handed it to her.

  “Call your people. I want twenty-five lakhs, now. Think of it as a tax for the life you live. Or you can choose to die. Up to you.”

  With trembling hands, Shabana called Sanjeev, but he did not answer. She tried again and again, thinking that he was in the shower, or on his motorbike, but all she got was a busy signal. She tried her manager, too, but he did not pick up. Finally the Hammer snatched the phone away from her.

  “You are time-wasting.” His enormous hands were trembling with rage. “Call someone who can deliver. You have one more call. That’s it.”

  Shabana paused, bewildered.

  “Come on, phone. Now.”

  She dialed a number that she hadn’t called in months. It rang for a long time before it was answered.

  “Ruki?” Shabana spoke quickly. “Please don’t hang up. It’s me … I need your help.”

  “You.” The voice was corrosive with disdain. “You need help? Why are you calling me? Where is your boyfriend, hanh?”

  “Ruki, please. This is serious, it’s a matter of life and death.”

  “You know, you’re always talking about death. It’s very boring. Maybe you should have thought a little more before getting rid of me. Good-bye.”

  She hung up and Shabana was left listening to the dial tone.

  Across from her, the Hammer frowned and cracked his knuckles, the sound filling the room like a gunshot.

  “Wait. I’ll call her again. She’ll listen to me, I swear.” With trembling fingers she redialed Ruksana’s number and listened to it ring. Come on, pick up, come on …

  “Why are you calling me again? I told you, I can’t help you.”

  “Wait.” Shabana was in tears. “Ruki, I’m sorry for firing you. Deeply sorry, and I need your help. The Hammer, he’s kidnapped me. I’m in this room—”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “It’s the Hammer. He wants twenty-five lakhs, today. Or else he will—”

  Ruksana laughed. “That big lunk is now in the kidnapping business?”

&nb
sp; Perhaps the Hammer heard the laughter on the other end, because his frown deepened. “Who are you talking to? She is laughing at me?”

  Ruksana chuckled some more. “So. The Hammer has picked you up, and your boyfriend is missing, and you want me to help you? Why should I?”

  “Please, Ruki, please, I need your help. If he doesn’t get the money, he says he’ll kill me.”

  “He will what? Put that fool on the telephone.”

  Shabana handed over the phone. When the call ended, the Hammer’s face was flushed with rage, but he didn’t say another word. He got up, pulled on a shirt, and left, locking the door behind him.

  Shabana stayed in that dark room for six hours more, most of them alone, and she took comfort in the sound of the clothes being washed next door. It reminded her of childhood, when her mother washed their school uniforms, thwacking them against the stone floor of the courtyard.

  Somewhere during that time the white-bearded man appeared and brought her hot tea in her own travel mug. He made a tsk-tsk-tsk sound when he saw how frightened she was, and said in a soothing voice that it would all be over soon.

  Late that afternoon she was blindfolded again before being driven away. She was pushed out at a busy intersection near Eros Cinema, and when she made her way home, she found Ruksana waiting at the flat. She had secured Shabana’s release for nine lakhs, delivered in a fake leather gym bag to a certain bhelpuri stall on Chowpatty Beach.

  Shabana broke down and sobbed till she lapsed into an exhausted silence. Ruksana just watched her, then spoke in a businesslike voice.

  “Needless to say, you will give me my job back. And this time, it will all be in writing. I will have a contract drawn up.” Shabana nodded, and she continued. “And we need to make one more call.”

  “The police?”

  “Why would we do that?” Ruksana smiled a twisted smile. “They are the most dangerous of all, because they’ll sell their loyalty to anyone. No, we are calling Don Hajji Mustafa. Where do you think I got the ransom money from?”

  The Don’s voice, coming over a remote wireless network from the Arabian Desert, was crackly and faint, but his tone was mild and comforting, the tone an indulgent father uses with his wayward daughter.

  “Beti, beti, beti…” he said. “Aare, I am so sorry about what happened. You tell me exactly what happened, and I will fix it.”

  In a small voice, Shabana told him all that she remembered: the billboard, the fifteen traffic lights, the old creaky stairs, the sound of clothes being washed.

  The Don listened, and said that she had done well to remember all this.

  “And Don, please, one more thing.” Shabana threw all caution to the wind. Sanjeev’s T-shirts and jeans were still hanging in the closet, but his motorcycle was gone. “My boyfriend, Sanjeev, he is missing. He did not go to work today. He has disappeared. Please find him. Please, for me.”

  “Don’t worry your pretty head, beti. It is done. Now you rest.”

  Ruksana stayed over that night. Shabana took two sleeping pills and cried herself to sleep.

  The next morning, she awoke late, befuddled from the medication, to find that the bag with the ransom money had been returned. And in that morning’s papers, she read the headlines and saw the blurry photographs: four of the Hammer’s men had been found dead in a room in Jogeshwari, shot in the head sometime during the night. The soles of their feet had been burned before they were killed. The newspapers said that it was the start of a bloody gang war; the absent Don Hajji Mustafa was asserting his muscle to get his former lieutenants back into line.

  Shabana looked closely at one of the photographs and screamed: the white-bearded old man who had brought her tea lay in a pool of his own blood, both his ears cut off.

  She took two more sleeping pills and went back to bed. When Don Hajji Mustafa called that evening, she spoke through a haze.

  “Don, those men, they … they didn’t do anything to me. That old man, he made me tea, he was harmless…” She began to cry.

  The Don remained silent for a moment, then spoke. “Beti, there is a line with me. If you cross that line, you know what will happen to you. Those men crossed that line. Now, don’t worry your pretty head about this … incident.”

  Shabana forced herself to stop crying. “Don, my friend Sanjeev, he has not returned. I can’t sleep, please help me.”

  “Beti.” The Don paused. “I have some bad news for you.”

  “No.” Shabana felt herself sinking through the floor. “He can’t be dead. Not Sanjeev.”

  “He is not dead, don’t worry.” The Don paused. “But he should be. Your Sanjeev is the one who set up this kidnapping with the Hammer. They were going to share in the ransom. Now he is nowhere to be found.”

  “It cannot be. Sanjeev would never, ever—”

  “My information is never wrong, beti. You should know better than to question me.” His tone hardened. “Wasn’t Sanjeev the one who encouraged you to fire your sister, to break with me?”

  “No. He just wanted me to be independent—”

  “Well, there is your answer.”

  Shabana slammed down the phone and looked at the triumphant expression on Ruksana’s face.

  “You,” Shabana screamed. “You did this. You bitch. You couldn’t stand to see me happy with Sanjeev. Somehow you did this, you, you…”

  A servant came running into the room, but Ruksana gestured at the man to go away. “My sister is hysterical,” Ruksana explained, “she’s had a very bad shock.”

  Shabana reached for more sleeping pills, but Ruksana stopped her.

  “That’s enough for now. What do you want to do, kill yourself? Stop all this melodrama.”

  Going into her bedroom, Shabana locked the door. She took one of Sanjeev’s dirty T-shirts from the wash basket and climbed into bed, inhaling his smell trapped within the worn cloth.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The morning after the men beat him, Ranjit’s arm hurts like hell. Sitting in Ali’s yellow cab, he swallows the first Percocet of the day and waits for the pain to recede. Ali picked him up half an hour ago, and they are now parked on Liberty Avenue, in the heart of Little Guyana.

  An elevated train rattles overhead, sending down a layer of fine dust, and then the avenue is quiet again. The midmorning sun shines through the metal structure of the El and casts zebra-striped shadows across the street below.

  Without the velvet sheen of night, the neighborhood looks like any other in Queens, rows of small stores on either side of the elevated tracks, their blue and yellow awnings flashes of color in the gloom. Pigeons waddle in the middle of the road, and then swoop up into the cast-iron web above them, the beams and columns spattered with a century of guano.

  “I can’t believe those bastards broke your arm. How bad does it hurt? Is the painkiller helping?” Ali gestures to the plaster cast. Today he wears a yellow Hawaiian shirt covered with red pineapples, the colors so violent that it makes Ranjit’s head hurt.

  “It’ll kick in soon.” Ranjit looks away as he talks. “Hey, you ever heard of someone called Lateef? Or ‘the Hammer’?”

  Ali Khan stares at him. “What planet do you live on, bhai? Veenu Gopal is a huge Mumbai gangster. They call him ‘the Hammer.’ You don’t watch Zee TV or what?”

  “I don’t have a TV.”

  “Hmmmpf. This Hammer, he used to be a lieutenant for Don Hajji Mustafa, but he started his own gang, took over huge parts of Mumbai. The funny part is that the Don has fled to Dubai, and this Hammer, he is now hiding in Indonesia.” Ali chuckles, and his chins quiver. “So it’s a remote-control gang war. Both of them sit in their mansions and calls in hits.”

  And clearly the Hammer doesn’t seem too fond of Lateef. “Did the TV mention a man named Lateef?”

  “Lateef? Half of India is called Lateef. I personally know six Lateefs.”

  “A gangster called Lateef?”

  Ali scowls as he thinks. “There are lots of smaller hoodlums, but I don’t think
any of them are called Lateef. Why?”

  “Just interested, that’s all.”

  “Can you please tell me what the hell is going on? I’m tired of you sitting there silently.” Ali’s face turns red with irritation.

  “Okay, but you’re not going to like it … I think Patel had something to do with Shabana’s death.”

  “What? He’s a businessman. He owns apartment buildings, he sells hair.”

  “Look, Ali, the cops are convinced that Mohan did it, but I don’t buy that. He’s a seducer, not a murderer. Sure, maybe he knew something about the murder, he took off, he was frightened. Now Patel wants me to find Mohan, before the cops do. Why? Does he want to shut Mohan up?”

  “Okay, that makes sense, but what’s the link between Patel and Shabana Shah?”

  “I don’t know, but this girl, Leela, she does. She pretty much told me that someone else was involved, and she works at Patel’s club. All those rumors I heard are true—Patel’s definitely mixed up with the Mumbai mafia, and the cops know this, that’s why they’re staking out the club … Leela is the key here, she knows something.”

  “I doubt that she’s going to just pour her heart out to you. She ran away once, clearly she’s terrified.” Ali gulps. The Mumbai mafia and nightclubs are far from his reality of driving a cab. “If there are mobsters involved, go tell the police. You can’t poke around on your own, it’s too damn dangerous—”

  “Tell the cops what? That I saw them on a stakeout? Then I’ll have to explain what I was doing there.”

  “If the cops can’t help you, then run. Go to Canada, go to Mexico, just get the hell out of here.”

  “Ali, just listen to what I have to say, okay? Yes, Leela was scared that night, but if I can just talk to her quietly, I have a feeling she’ll help me. But first, I have to find out where she lives. That’s where you come in.”

  Ranjit reaches one-handed into his pocket and pulls out a lady’s lilac pocketbook with a gold clasp. He found it in his cab, and should have turned it in to the central lost and found, but it’s been lying in his apartment for months.